Frost / Nixon

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Play closed 3 February 2007

Gielgud Theatre Shaftesbury Avenue, London

Following a critically acclaimed sell-out season at The Donmar Warehouse, the World Premiere production of Peter Morgan's play Frost / Nixon starring Michael Sheen and Frank Langella and directed by Michael Grandage transfers to The Gielgud Theatre for a strictly limited three month run.

"Absorbing... riveting drama" The Times

In 1972, a break-in was foiled at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC. Within days a connection had been made to the White House and to President Nixon's closest aides. It unleashed one of the greatest scandals in modern AMerican politics and ended with Nixon's humiliating resignation.

David Frost's interviews with Richard Nixon, following the Watergate scandal, drew the largest audience for a news interview ever. Could this British talk-show host be the one to elicit an apology from the man who committed one of the biggest felonies in American political history?

The entire original Donmar Warehouse cast are expected to reprise their roles: Michael Sheen as 'David Frost' Frank Langella as 'Richard Nixon' along with Elliot Cowan, Amerjit Deu, Corey Johnson, Lydia Leonard, Vincent Marzello, Kate Roscoe, Kerry Shale and Rufus Wright. (Casting subject to change).

"An enthralling semi-documentry drama" The London Evening Standard

The writer Peter Morgan on Frost / Nixon: "Having met most of the participants and interviewed them at length, I'm satisfied no one will ever agree on a single, 'true' version of what happened in the Frost Nixon interviews – thirty years on we are left with many truths or fictions depending on your point of view. As an author, perhaps inevitably, that appeals to me, to think of history as a creation, or several creations, and in the spirit of it all I have, on occasion, been unable to resist using my imagination... Everyone I spoke to told the story their way. Even people in the room tell different versions. There's no one truth about what happened in those interviews, so I feel very relaxed about bringing my imagination to the piece. God knows everyone else has."

"A sharp, witty and haunting production by Michael Grandage - a fascinating piece" The Independent

"In Peter Morgan's compelling and intelligent dramatisation... [Michael Sheen's] David Frost is a tour de force. On one level it is a brilliant impersonation but he also communicates how insecure and driven Frost is... Frank Lamella has a meatier part in Richard Nixon and he savours every morsel of it... At times funny, often sad, always uncomfortable in his own skin, it is a wonderfully human study that constrats starkly with Sheen's plasticky interrogator." The Sunday Telegraph

"A terrific new play that is as thought-provoking as it is gripping and entertaining" The Daily Telegraph

"The dramatic tensions are ratcheted up grippingly. The acting is sharp and subtly ambiguous too, so that you walk away still weighing up both men. Michael Sheen's swanky David Frost does seem like a caricatured joke at first but he becomes more complex, with a wild-eyed desperate ambition and perhaps more slow-burning canniness than initially meets the eye. Frank Langella's gruff, towering Richard Nixon is especially intriguing, almost too sympathetic but disturbingly combining an air of statesmanlike authority with a chilling casual amorality, cunning mind-games and incipient vulnerability. Worth catching." The Independent on Sunday

"A gripping study of the politics of the media" The Guardian

"This is a very entertaining bit of theatre, largely thanks to the two leads. Frank Langella, as Richard Nixon, is dignified and presidential... Michael Sheen is a marvellous David Frost: superficial, utterly lacking in any sense of himself or his own motivations beyond some vague worship of “success”, yet undeniably likeable, funny and energetic, brimming with optimism and chutzpah." The Sunday Times